According to the paper this morning (NYP-Article), the guy who owns the company that owns Pabst, Old Milwaukee, Schlitz, Ballantine, Colt 45, Lone Star, Olympia, Piels, Schaefer, Schmidt, Stroh’s (and, probably, others like Narragansett) wants to sell and is asking $300,000,000.

That’s a lot considering that the actual brewing of all those iconic American beers is contracted out to Molson, a Canadian company.

One of the amazing things about beer brands is that it doesn’t matter much who brews what.

When I was a bartender, my favorite job ever, customers would occasionally argue about which was the best beer. If it was a slow night, I’d conduct a blind tasting of five different beers. In maybe 100 tests, only a few guys ever picked their fave beers, including one who then astonished the audience by naming the other four correctly before burping, excusing himself and reeling off into the night.

(I occasionally ran the same test when guys argued about Scotch. I’d put out 5 different Scotches in lowball glasses, only I lied; two of them were Scotches, but one was brandy, one Canadian and the other was golden rum. Every now and then someone would notice the rum or the brandy. Everybody thought the Canadian was a Scotch.)

If you make it cold enough, a martini with McCormick’s el cheapo gin is, for most people, indistinguishable from a martini made with more expensive gin, say, Tanqueray. (And a martini made with vodka isn’t a martini.)

I still get a kick out of people who insist on Grey Goose or a high end single malt or a bottle of $100 wine. They’re paying for a label and not a product. (The products are terrific; the issue is that most of us can’t tell, especially after a drink or two.)

The power of brand drives the bulk of the beer and booze business, which brings up an interesting question: how do you screw up a great brand?

How did the great Schlitz and Schaefer (and Stroh’s which bought both Sch brands before being bought by Pabst) wind up in the remainder bin? How on earth did Seagram’s just disappear?

This kind of thing happens all the time. Pepsodent toothpaste was neck and neck with Colgate for a while and then the bottom fell out. Now someone over in Asia makes it and you occasionally see Pepsodent for 50 cents in dollar stores. Pears’ soap once ruled the Anglosphere, now very few people have even heard of it.

The answer, other than expanding too quickly or not expanding at all, is, I think, obvious. It’s arrogance. The people who run a lot of great brands have absolutely no sense of the customer, the people who make their brands great. They never talk to them.

One thing I learned in the bar business is that about 20% of customers are responsible, one way or another, for 80% of revenue. It’s easy to identify and relate with the core 20% in a bar; it’s a lot trickier when they live all over the world. I’d want to know who they are and I’d love to hear from them all the time, every one of them, every day if I could.

That’s where direct marketing should come in, but doesn’t, at least not often enough. Jack Daniel’s has a nice relationship program, mostly online. So does Budweiser but they’re both one-way programs that talk at consumers, not with them.

Listening and reacting to customers would be expensive, of course, but shaving a few bucks from the bottom line to pay for it would bring big time benefits and that sure beats getting bundled with a bunch of other loser brands and sold off to bottom feeders.